May 16, 2008
Category: D'oh(pe)!
Tim Montgomery, who once held the distinction of being the fastest man on the planet with a 100-meter dash time of 9.78 seconds, is about to become a number of a vastly different, much less celebrated sort.
The 33-year-old one-time partner of Marion Jones -- also a former sprint superstar and also sentenced to jail (she's serving a six-month stint for perjury and obstruction of justice in a Fort Worth facility) -- has landed almost four years in prison courtesy of Judge Kenneth Karas, who told Montgomery, ""Being a track star does not somehow disable someone from saying no."
Actually, I wouldn't count on that. Tim Montgomery Jr., Jones' and Montgomery's four-year-old, is one of four children the Montgomery has fathered.
Montgomery, who pleaded guilty last year to his role in a scam that saw him deposit $1.7 million in fake checks, is also facing charges for heroin distribution. Marion Jones may have had a longer fall from her pinnacle (she held five Olympic medals) to Earth than did Montgomery, but the latter is clearly en route to digging himself much further into ignominy and an all-around bleak future than Jones, whose legal problems will at least be over by fall.
Posted by Kevin Beck at 5:55 PM • 1 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: D'oh(pe)!
So says someone who should know. Victor Conte, the head of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) in Burlingame, Calif. who spend four months in the federal pen for his massive role in supplying professional athletes with illegal performance-enhancing drugs, has seemingly done nothing but thrive rhetorically and even professionally since serving his slap-on-the-cuticle penalty. He has turned his blunt and almost charming realism into an asset that keeps him squarely in the center of the drugs-in-sport issue as those he served line up to face federal perjury charges and Conte himself remains immune to further prosecution.
CBC Sports out of Canada has an article about the upcoming Games vis-a-vis drug use that reviews BALCO's role in the more recent chemical maelstroms and solicits Conte's ideas not only on drug use itself but -- somewhat in the manner of law enforcement bringing a jewel thief on board to help with safecracking techniques -- how to best fight it. This passage captures what continues to be a media and public-opinion blind spot on the issue:
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Beck at 11:55 AM • 0 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: The Running Ape
A couple years ago, San Francisco native Shannon Rowbury, then a junior at Duke University, was one of the best middle-distance runners in the NCAA. As a film major, she made a video about her cross-country team's quest to win the 2005 national cross-country title.
Now Shannon is a national champion (she won the 3,000 meters at the USATF Indoor Nationals in February) with Olympic aspirations, and her father has submitted her video to a contest staged by Flocasts, a site that streams coverage of track and field meets that don't make the cable TV cut (which in the U.S. is practically all of them). The contest winner, as determined by votes cast by site visitors, will receive two airline tickets, hotel accommodations, and tickets to see the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Shannon is as good a bet to make the Olympic Track and Field Team as anyone, and it would be nice if she could to grab a couple of tickets so that friends or family members who otherwise couldn't make the trip to Beijing could go watch their heroine take on the world's best milers. If my bias here is showing, I have good reasons for it -- I've spent time with a lot of elite track and field athletes over the years owing to my personal and vocational travels, and there are few hominids out there with Shannon's combination of talent, humility, competitive spirit and joie de vivre.
Y'all have shown that you're into descending on polls and toppling them in favor of the most reasonable position by dint of sheer numbers. Well, here's another chance to do the same thing, albeit with no moral outrages or ethical quandaries at issue. Fact is, Shannon's an experienced filmmaker with an eye for both imagery and editing and her project outclasses those of the other clowns on the ballot by a rollicking amount. So here's the deal:
- First go here and watch
- Then go here and give Blue Soles a "6" vote.
That's it. Some of the other submissions are entertaining, but (cue up Michael Myers and Dana Carvey voices)) they're not worthy!
Anyway, enjoy.
Posted by Kevin Beck at 11:19 AM • 1 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: Arachnophobia
I have been known to display my love-hate relationship with spiders here on the Refuge. Knowing my ambivalent feelings toward arachnids, on-line droogs have shared photos of a couple of cool orb weavers, the type of spider I like, versus the lycosids which freak me out.
Spider porn below the fold...
Read on »
Posted by Dr. Joan Bushwell at 11:10 AM • 1 Comments •
View blog reactions
May 15, 2008
Category: Society Gone Bananas
Keith Olbermann is over the top (and understandably so) whenever he takes aim at George W. Bush, and his criticism of Bush for responding to a "what's the worst-case scenario?" question by saying "they'll attack us" is unfair -- Bush's reply to this, if not to much else, was eminently reasonable. But there's something surreal about what happens whenever Bush abandons his campaign of profligate, Machiavellan mendacity and actually tries to address the citizenry from the heart -- and I'm certain Bush honestly believes that telling the country he was giving up golf was a warm and brilliant stroke -- because that's when it hits home that America actually elected someone this dumb to the presidency. The man looks like a kid with really bad ADHD who decided to skip his Ritalin one morning and smoke a three-ounce ball of hash instead.
Kinda makes you not want to stand in line in public for too long, eh?
Posted by Kevin Beck at 4:12 PM • 3 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: Troglodytes at Play
No editorializing is needed on this. As the Pope himself admits, you're either a Catholic who accepts this weirdness without blinking or a thinking human being (Catholic in name or otherwise) who can only shake his or head when confronted with the kind of foolishness that terms like "outdated" only glorify.
Posted by Kevin Beck at 1:35 PM • 9 Comments •
View blog reactions
May 14, 2008
Category: Troglodytes at Play
As you have perhaps heard, Jose Gabriel Funes, the director of the Vatican Observatory, has gone public with the idea that life may have developed elsewhere in the universe.
There's nothing radical or outlandish about this at all. It's squarely in line with what most astronomers believe, and if anything the AP headline was -- in conjuring up images of Alf or E.T. -- taking an unnecessary potshot at Funes, who has been a credit to his post throughout his brief (21-month) tenure as chief stargazer.
That said, Funes' attempts to reconcile faith and science only underscore how futile -- and moreover, pointless -- it is to try to meld baseless mythological belief systems with systematic, evidence- and trial-and-error-based information gathering. Anyone with a scripted agenda, a touch of verbal dexterity, and a load of wishful thinking can claim that X doesn't contradict science, where X is anything, from a well-defined observable concept to something ludicrous you just pulled out of your own ass.
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Beck at 7:54 PM • 9 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: D'oh(pe)!
The BALCO trials are officially underway, and its targets are finding out that it's not about the drugs anymore -- it's the dishonesty, stupid.
If Barry Bonds believed that his fame and fortune would allow him to slide on federal charges, he may be starting to rethink that philosophy. The government has far more resources that the all-time dinger king could ever dream of, and if it's one thing the feds don't let pass with wink-winks or slaps on the wrist, it's lying to them.
The wording of the AP story is amusing:
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Beck at 8:16 AM • 3 Comments •
View blog reactions
May 13, 2008
Category: Troglodytes at Play
Quick: What goes through your mind when you look at the following image?
If it occurred to you that this cartoon, which Marietta, Georgia bar owner Mike Norman is proudly and defiantly hawking at his establishment in the form of T-shirts, might be considered racially sensitive in some circles, you're not alone. But as of 5:35 EDT on May 13, you'd be in the minority of respondents to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution Poll.
Based on some other verbal gems he's produced, Norman would have a hard time arguing that he legitimately supports the Democratic front-runner for the presidency. To wit:
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Beck at 5:40 PM • 51 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: Pattern Juggling • What The Heck Is That Thing?
And now for something completely different, the tongue drum:
The tongue drum is also known as the slit drum or xylo-slit drum. It is the modern descendant of the ancient log drum. This is a large 14 key unit tuned to a pentatonic scale in G. It can be played with mallets or your fingers (with somewhat of a quick, snapping-back style). The sound is very mellow and pleasing. Organic might be a good term. This particular item came from here.
Besides the tone, what I find interesting about the drum is that unlike most musical instruments, it doesn't have a "normal" orientation. That is, the instrument can be approached and played from any of its four sides. You just don't do that with other instruments. Nobody walks up to a piano, lays across the closed lid, and proceeds to play with bass keys to the right and treble to the left. There's really only one way to hold a saxophone in all practicality. While some people have been known to arrange drum kits in non-standard ways, I don't know of anything as simple and direct as a tongue drum which exhibits this sort of free-wheeling, play-me-from-any-side nature.
Why would anyone care? Well, the way you interact with an instrument, the way it talks to you and you get it to talk, depends in part on the way you approach it, both figuratively and literally. While my first inclination was play it in the horizontal mode pictured above, it quickly occurred to me that a 180 degree rotation changed the locations of the notes and thus an identical hand pattern produced a different, though related, melody. It was a short step from there to a vertical orientation, more like a glockenspiel than a xylophone. It's almost like getting four instruments in one.
And ultimately, this reminds of another useful thing about electronic drums, and that's the ability to assign sounds and pitches anywhere on the kit. I think it's time to create a few new kits where the tom pitches are lowest toward the front and higher off to the sides.
Posted by Jim Fiore at 8:34 AM • 2 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: What The Heck Is That Thing?
Humans have an ability to recognize patterns, even if they're not really there, like the face of Jesus in a pizza or Elvis on the side of a Holstein. Apparently, a local lumberjack recognized something in a certain tree trunk and decided to flip it upside down and paint it blue in order to help passersby see the illusion. This little bit of "found art" is located less than two miles from my house and I had a good laugh when I first saw it:
Jesus on a pizza it ain't, but it sure is entertaining nonetheless.
Posted by Jim Fiore at 8:22 AM • 4 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: My Bent Brain
Have you been paying attention to science news? See if you can answer the little quiz below (my mind was wondering while proctoring my Science of Sound final exam yesterday).
Which of the following is not both a planet and an element in the Periodic Table:
A. Mercury
B. Uranus/Uranium
C. Neptune/Neptunium
D. Pluto/Plutonium
No fair looking up a Periodic Table either.
Posted by Jim Fiore at 8:02 AM • 1 Comments •
View blog reactions
May 12, 2008
Category: Society Gone Bananas
It's no secret that the amount of bullshit gushing through and out Florida is, by both absolute and per-capita measures, unquestionably higher than in any other state. Even when Texas gets on one of its famous thundering rolls backward, it's not even close
But what has recently transpired between the Pasco County School District and a substitute teacher in the pissburg of Land O' Lakes, located a half-hour west outside of Tampa, makes recent creationist hijinks in the legislature and other gawkables seem like the output of preternaturally composed intellectuals.
Check it out:
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Beck at 10:44 PM • 6 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: Health and Society
Three months ago, I mentioned that the mayor of perennially zaftig Oklahoma City, having lost 38 pounds in 10 months himself, had launched an initiative aimed at getting locals to shed excess weight. By late April, over 17,700 official participants in Cornett's program had lost a collective 68,700 pounds over 16 weeks, about four pounds per person and roughly a pound a month. The ultimate goal: one million collective pounds shed.
Clearly, the numbers are less important than the overall promotion of lifestyle changes that include healthful weight loss as onely one benefit. The site Cornett launched is hardly a "let's-start-starving-you-lardballs!" production; it includes all sorts of information about exercise, nutrition, behavioral modification and so on.
As the wire story explains, fast-food megachain Taco Bell, having launched a new low-fat "Fresco Menu" in December, contacted Cornett after learning of his brainchild and his concomitant fears that fast-food restaurants would balk at it. Company reps told Cornett that once the number of dropped pounds of program participants reaches 100,000, everyone in OKC will be entitled to a free low-fat taco from the recently launched menu. And, save for the fact that Taco Bell's food (in my opinion) tastes like shit warmed over, they all lived happily ever after.
Well, not exactly.
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Beck at 2:57 PM • 4 Comments •
View blog reactions
May 11, 2008
Category: Fun with Politics
Carl Hiaasen writes in his Miami Herald column today about Sen. Barack Obaba's association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a yammering jackass who happens to be African-American but whose chief characteristic is his religious lunacy, a destructive influence which -- like alcoholism, AIDS, poverty, and other afflictions nearly as devastating and corrupt as a faith-based world view -- is color-blind.
Hiassen notes a very important distinction between Obama's relationship with Wright and McCain's (not to mention various other Republican notables') pandering to conservative Christabouts:
"McCain's bonding with Rev. Falwell remains harder to comprehend than Obama's relationship with Rev. Wright, which began before Obama's political career. Rev. Wright was Obama's hometown pastor in Chicago; not a national TV personality whose endorsement might help get him elected someday."
Spot on. McCain has a long history of symbolically fellating anyone whose influence might earn him votes, which is doubly troubling in that it not only speaks to McCain's mentality and character but also highlights how fucked up this country has to be to render squint-eyed, knee-walking shitbags like James Dobson and the not-late-enough Jerry Falwell -- who would be nothing more than cartoon villains in most any other advanced society -- people worth sucking up to. McCain claims to have balls whenever he invokes his POW days and the Iraq war, but if he had any real sack, and more importantly a concern for America's well-being, he's distance himself from these bloated old delusion-mongering pricks and rely on his strength as a leader to earn him a seat in the White House.
Posted by Kevin Beck at 4:15 PM • 2 Comments •
View blog reactions
Category: The New Woo Revue
If there's one part of the country that may be as obsessed with its collective personal appearance as Los Angeles, it's Florida -- specifically its larger cities and metropolitan areas, especially those in the state's southern coastal areas: Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, Tampa-St, Petersburg, Naples, Fort Myers, and others.
In L.A., people at least have the excuse of needing to look New and Improved owing to anticipated, incipient, or extant acting careers. In Florida people just want to look good for the hell of it, and more specifically don't want to look old even though the median age is (reaching into my ass here) about 87.3.
I live in the Sarasota-Bradenton mini-coglomerate, which numbers about 650,000 people, among them Stephen King, Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee Wee Herman), Jerry Springer, and Martina Navratilova. It's not the sprawling hell that Broward County, where I held my first Florida address, has become, and it retains a more of an "old Florida" feel than strip-mall- and golf-course-covered South Florida does. But make no mistake -- it has its fair share of eight-lane thoroughfares, magnificently inconsiderate drivers, and ugly condominiums, with the influx of humanity trickling off recently as a result not of carefully managed growth but of a cratering housing market.
Getting back to the main idea here, plastic surgery and its derivatives are more than alive and well -- they're thundering around town, priapic and beaming ever prepared to give your wallet a nice reaming while returning nothing of value. And some of those derivatives are comically, gloriously dishonest.
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Beck at 1:54 PM • 3 Comments •
View blog reactions
